This course helps students develop their skills and performance as negotiators. This is an experiential learning course with substantial use of critiqued simulation exercises including recorded and individually critiqued exams. Student will study and practice techniques, processes and strategies of effective negotiation behavior in a number of setting that simulate legal practice. An intensive negotiations course involves substantial interpersonal engagement. Such engagement facilities self reflection and relevant insight about oneself as negotiator as a negotiator.

By the end of this course, students should:

Be able to recognize (and know how to deal with) key issues that are intrinsic to virtually all contexts in which lawyers negotiate.

Learn how to prepare and why preparation is so important (and not just in negotiations).

Learn how to craft successful strategies that enable parties to satisfy their respective priorities by combining creativity with a realistic assessment of the parties’ goals, needs and leverage.

Appreciate the importance of “making sense” (a matter of substance, not style) and learn to make sufficient sense when articulating one’s own positions that the “other side” will understand why you are unlikely to abandon them.